upgraded drawings slow and data shortcuts breaking

[Calbarda]

Hello,

I am hoping the civil 3D community can help me with a very strange and stress inducing issue.

I have a set of drawings that was created in Civil 3D 2012, the alignments, existing ground profile, some superimposed profiles and 3 pipe networks are all data shortcuts out of the same file which has never been moved or renamed since its creation back in June of this year. The original Ground surfaces are in 2 other drawings, one from lidar data and the other an actual survey aloso never moved or renamed. Recently I upgraded the drawings to Civil 3D 2014 and that when everything started to go wrong. Initially I didn’t notice out of the ordinary but then a day or 2 after the upgrade the drawings became very slow to open 5+ minutes, the only hint I have as to what is talking so long is the progress bar in the lower left hand corner that is indicating that the slow load is during the synchronization of the references. I went through a dgnpurged, purged and audited the drawings and that seemed to make a bit of a difference but they were still slower than normal.

Today when I went into the drawings things started to get a whole lot worse for me. For some reason when I started to go into the drawings a bunch of them where missing their superimposed profiles all in was showing me was a white proxy entity box, like the one you get when you open civil 3d files in regular cad without the civil 3d enabler. If I deleted the entity and re referenced the data shortcut and saved and closed the drawing and then went back to open the drawing the entire profile with all its civil 3d entities are gone and replaced with the same proxy boxes as mentioned above but for everything now. The drawings also keep opening the event log which says things about broken references and unable to find surfaces and the such, which like I said above I have never moved or renamed any of the files associated with the civil 3D project. Because of this level of damage I was forced to completely rebuild 2 drawings of my set.

I had civil 3d reset back to default settings and that did not make any difference, and am now considering having my IT department completely reinstall my 2014 civil 3D.

Some system information that may be relevant:

Civil 3D 2014: Product version I.108.0.4. SP2

Windows & 64 bit

32 GB Ram

Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-1650 v2 “3.50GHz

NVIDIA Quadro K2000

Any help and or insight you could provide would be appreciated so I can understand what went wrong and why.

Thank you,

Carl

[Jay_B]

Carl,

We upgraded from 2012 to 2014 last fall and overall the conversion of numerous 2012 projects to 2014 has went very well.

There were a few issues with an occasional data reference having to be recreated but overall the upgrade very smooth here.

On the projects I've upgraded I didn't have Superimposed Profiles in the mix.

Below are the steps we recommended to all users here when upgrading their projects existing projects from 2012 to 2014 Civil 3D..

1. Manually set the Data shortcuts working folder as 2014 can't find it until folder has been set one initial time.

2. Open the base drawing containing survey & EG surface.

3. Set the Survey Database working folder, (the 2012 Survey Databases will have yellow warnings by them).

Rt. click on the heading "Survey Databases" top of prospector & choose "Migrate Databases" or they can also be done

individually if multiple sdb's by clicking on sdb name rt. click & choose "Migrate".

4. Save & close the base dwg.

5. Open & Save all alignment \ profile\ corridor \ cross sections \ pipe network drawings until all C3d source dwgs have been upgraded before opening any plan sheets.

6. Open & Save all c3d plan sheets drawings.

In addition to the above, new profiles for 2014 were built from scratch and user profiles were not migrated from 2012 version at all.

When upgrading the project we follow the same workflow order that was used to create the project start to finish.

[Calbarda]

We don't use the survey databases within civil 3D, but other then that I went through my entire project and ensure all drawings were saved to 2014 and removed and re-added all the data shortcuts I required. Unfortunatly that did not really help. Today I had to go back into the drawings as the design team wanted to add some information but to add it properly while allowing the drawings to still clean and readable I removed the superimposed profiles from the data shortcuts of the main profiles which seemed to make a difference. I had to remaike a couple drawings as the damage had been done to them but as far as today goes right now things are moving faster and seem to be more stable.

My lesson learned on this seems to be if you use superimposed profiles do not do the superimposing within your main civil 3D file and then data shortcut it out as part of your primary alignment as this appears to be where the issue comes up. Rather data shortcut out the the alignment and its profile that you need to superimpose and connect them within your actual drawing and and do the superimposing there.